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Recovering Bookchin: Social Ecology and the Crises of Our Time
Through an extensive body of political and philosophical ideas he called social ecology, Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) elucidated one of the first intellectual responses to the ecological crisis. However, over the last two decades of his life Bookchin’s ideas slipped from focus, obscured by the emergence of a crude caricature that portrayed him as a dogmatic sectarian who intended to dominate the radical left for his own personal motivations. In this book, Andy Price revisits the Bookchin caricature and critically discounts it as the product of a largely misguided literature that focused on Bookchin the individual and not his ideas. By looking afresh at Bookchin's work, Price argues that his contribution can be seen to provide a coherent practical and theoretical response to the ecological and social crises of our time.
264 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2012
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About the author
Andy Price
3 booksThere is more than one author with this name
Dr Andy Price is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. He has written articles on both Bookchin and social ecology and on contemporary radical movements for the academic and popular press.
Dr Andy Price is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. He has written articles on both Bookchin and social ecology and on contemporary radical movements for the academic and popular press.
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February 20, 2013
Back in the 1980s, the emerging Green political movement was looking for an alternative to conventional politics and became enamored with a “new paradigm” based on holism. The earth is a living whole, a unitary system, ran the adopted view, and we dwellers upon it should peacefully seek consensus over conflict, diversity over monoculture, and symbiosis over polarization. A new ecological spirituality, worshipping nature, even an earth goddess, pervaded the movement.
Amid the nodding bliss, a tendency emerged within the movement that was poised to test the mettle of the “new paradigm.” According to deep ecology (the philosophy) and Earth First! (the activists), humans are radically distinct from the rest of nature. With their civilization and their technology, they are a blight on the biosphere; they should change their ways and humble themselves before untouched wilderness. One deep ecologist even outrageously declared that the world should allow people in famine-stricken Ethiopia—impoverished black people—to starve to death, in order to reduce population numbers, to let nature take its course.
The ecology movement, steeped in mellow, embracing diversity, initially seemed at a loss to challenge this ugly development. But Murray Bookchin, who had come out of a contentious leftist tradition and who had been propounding what he called “social ecology” for half a century, had no trouble finding his voice. In 1987 he took the deep ecologists to task for promulgating the misanthropy and even racism. It’s capitalism, it’s hierarchy, it’s domination that’s causing the ecological crisis, he said—our social arrangements—not people as such.
It’s easy to understand what Bookchin meant by “social ecology” when contrasted with deep ecology. Debates bring out the contrasts between ideas and let us weigh their merits more easily than a straightforward, linear exposition might do. That was why Bookchin himself often affirmed that argument is not only healthy but necessary in order to to clarify ideas,
But so mellow had the eco-movement become that, instead of rallying to Bookchin’s side, as any humane person would have done, most of its members turned against him and cried instead for harmony and reconciliation. When Bookchin, astounded, refused to reconcile himself to racist misanthropy, the greens attacked him. Since they had no intellectual or political ground upon which to stand, they resorted to ad hominem gossip and personal caricature. They said his tone was unpleasant and unduly harsh. They accused him of waging a “turf war” and seeking to foment a “red-green putsch.” Bookchin gave as good as he got, but the fight became bitter. By the time he died in 2006, the embers had long since cooled, but his reputation was still tainted as that of an ornery, peevish, resentful old man.
***
Andy Price, a native of Manchester, U.K., never met Bookchin, but in the early 2000s, having enrolled at his local university, he began to pore over Bookchin’s writings, paying special attention to this debate. As he waded through the jabs and counter-jabs, parsing the ad hominem slurs, carefully examining the debate with a fresh outsider’s eye, he kept thinking (as he recounts) that in the next paragraph he would finally come to a the intellectual substance of the greens’ objection to Bookchin’s argument—they would finally make a serious rejoinder. But he never found it.
He has now written Recovering Bookchin, his first book, to clear away the smoke and debris raised by the fracas and shine a light on the thing that went missing from the angry greens’ side: content. In terms of content, he concludes, the deep ecologists and their apologists, for all their fulminations, never laid a glove on Murray Bookchin.
Price’s book not only “recovers” Bookchin from the 1990s mud-slinging; it validates Bookchin's thesis that argumentation (as opposed to mindless, nodding consensus) clarifies ideas. Not only is it an essential text for all future study of social ecology; it will likely educate even many current social ecologists about just what social ecology is.
* * *
Some leftist literature dissects the ills of the existing society, revealing its many abuses and injustices: it is engaged with the “what is.” Another sort of literature is prospective, envisioning alternative social arrangements in works that range from utopian dreams to detailed blueprints: the “what should be.”
Bookchin’s work ranges over the terrain between the two, the realm that lies between the "what is" and the "what should be.” There in that intermediate zone, as Price makes clear, Bookchin looked for actual pathways that could take us from the existing society to a new, rational one that would be both ecological and humane. By examining these potentialities, dialectically, he tried to show the radical left how, beyond mounting rallies and protests demonstrations, it could embark on the formidable process of making a transition to the good society.
But as Price shows, even Bookchin’s more sophisticated critics, accustomed to more conventional ways of thinking, misunderstood this about him, misunderstood the dialectical nature of his cast of mind and of his writing and of his entire project. Does Bookchin tell us (in his book The Ecology of Freedom) that long ago, in “organic” or tribal societies, people lived harmoniously? Then, his critics say, he is guilty of misrepresentation, since he has neglected to inform us that intertribal warfare was endemic in those societies as well. Does Bookchin writes about cities (in many works, including Urbanization Without Cities)? Then, his critics say, he must be in favor of cities as they are today, anonymous, sterile, concrete moonscapes. Does Bookchin designate the citizen (rather than the worker) the agent of revolutionary change? That is intolerable, say his anarchist critics, for “citizen” is a statist concept. Does Bookchin find that a path toward change runs through existing city government? Then that clinches the case against him as a statist, for the city today is merely a miniature nation-state.
In each of these and other objections made by Bookchin’s critics in the more sober 1990s debates, Price shows that Bookchin was misunderstood. If he high highlighted the peaceable cooperative qualities of “organic society,” it was simply to show us that people had lived cooperatively once and can do so again—not to say that that society was perfect. If he argued that the city contains a possible path to change, it was simply to identify a possibility, to make cities places of conviviality and political vitality and ecological sanity, not to guarantee the final outcome of taking the path, let alone to endorse the existing city.
A pattern emerges, as Price’s recovery operation proceeds: he shows us that Bookchin the dialectician worked in the realm between is and ought, the terrain between the sordid today and the possible tomorrow. Price’s great achievement is to explicate the ways that Bookchin charted that terrain.
For me, the subtlest and most illuminating section of his book is the one that treats the subject of ethics. Bookchin proposed that one could ground an ethical system in nature. Among social ecologists, the subject of such an “objective ethics” has been a tortured one—even some of Bookchin’s most fervent admirers have rejected this part of his work. Granted, the phrase “objective ethics” hints at all kinds of philosophical dangers and social pitfalls. But Bookchin was well aware of them, and as Price shows, he never meant to say that nature is somehow ethical in itself.
Then Price proceeds to explain, far better than anyone ever has (myself included), what Bookchin meant. Nature unfolds in a process of growing complexity and diversity. Its directionality has led to increasingly self-conscious life forms. That's an unfolding history on which ethics can be grounded. Once again, the key to this question is potentiality: "Bookchin is not reading his ethics as a fact of nature, but solely as grounded on a potentiality, elicited by speculative thought, that can be found in natural processes." Our place in evolution is itself an objective potentiality for the creation of an ecological society.
The problems of ethics, and of humanity’s place in nature, are ones that the environmental movement is grappling with even today. In some quarters discontent is growing with the notion that nature is radically separate from humanity, with misanthropy, and with rejections of civilization. Today’s “green modernists” (as opposed to “green traditionalists”) are recognizing that untouched wilderness doesn’t really exist, and that people are actually part of nature, part of all ecosystems. Fans of Emma Marris’s 2011 book Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World are hungry for a framework that is not only pro-environment but pro-humanity and even pro-technology.
They would do well to consider Bookchin’s work, as decades ago he brought the wrath of the green movement down upon himself by asserting that human beings—with selfhood and reason—are part of the continuum nature, having evolved within it. That humanity is uniquely aware of this fact and is capable of guiding nature as a whole toward the fulfillment of its potentialities for freedom and self-consciousness. Twenty-five years ago “stewardship” was a dirty word. Perhaps even that attitude is changing, giving a “recovered” Bookchin a new relevance.
* * *
During the 1990s, Bookchin embroiled himself in a related conflict within the anarchist movement, criticizing this movement’s lack of a “social” component as well, and bringing down similar damage to his reputation, this time partly deserved. But then, by the mid-1990s the political reaction was grinding him down, causing the potentialities that he had so lovingly identified and watered and nurtured to wane. The terrain of potentiality, between is and ought, was looking less like a forest and more like a desert.
Meanwhile his writings were being translated into other languages, absent the smoke and debris, so outside the English-speaking world, Bookchin’s avid readers had no inkling of the ad hominem debates. The result is that today radical movements in those places have no need of a Bookchin recovery operation. For example, when I traveled to Greece, in the fall of 2008, admirers of the many Greek translations of his work asked me what was happening with Bookchin’s ideas back in the United States. I explained that his reputation was still clouded by the ad hominem nastiness of the previous years and had yet to emerge from it. They looked at me in bafflement, as if to ask (or so I imagined), why are Americans so hung up on personality? What about content?
Another example: Bookchin’s work has been much translated into Turkish, where the Kurds of southeastern Anatolia have embraced it wholeheartedly. The paralyzing ad hominem trashings are unknown to them: and as I write, they are attempting to implement social ecology, in cities and towns and villages of Hakkari and Van and Batman and Diyarbakir. More than anywhere else in the world, the Kurds are struggling to build a grassroots-democratic, ecological society, on the basis of Bookchin’s ideas.
Price’s enthusiasm for his excellent task is evident on every page. Defying the stylistic constraints of academic writing, he writes with verve and panache. In the process of recovering the work of an honest and brilliant and relevant thinker whose work was, twenty-some years ago, unjustifiably sullied, he has established himself as, hands down, the foremost living interpreter of the literary oeuvre of Murray Bookchin.
Amid the nodding bliss, a tendency emerged within the movement that was poised to test the mettle of the “new paradigm.” According to deep ecology (the philosophy) and Earth First! (the activists), humans are radically distinct from the rest of nature. With their civilization and their technology, they are a blight on the biosphere; they should change their ways and humble themselves before untouched wilderness. One deep ecologist even outrageously declared that the world should allow people in famine-stricken Ethiopia—impoverished black people—to starve to death, in order to reduce population numbers, to let nature take its course.
The ecology movement, steeped in mellow, embracing diversity, initially seemed at a loss to challenge this ugly development. But Murray Bookchin, who had come out of a contentious leftist tradition and who had been propounding what he called “social ecology” for half a century, had no trouble finding his voice. In 1987 he took the deep ecologists to task for promulgating the misanthropy and even racism. It’s capitalism, it’s hierarchy, it’s domination that’s causing the ecological crisis, he said—our social arrangements—not people as such.
It’s easy to understand what Bookchin meant by “social ecology” when contrasted with deep ecology. Debates bring out the contrasts between ideas and let us weigh their merits more easily than a straightforward, linear exposition might do. That was why Bookchin himself often affirmed that argument is not only healthy but necessary in order to to clarify ideas,
But so mellow had the eco-movement become that, instead of rallying to Bookchin’s side, as any humane person would have done, most of its members turned against him and cried instead for harmony and reconciliation. When Bookchin, astounded, refused to reconcile himself to racist misanthropy, the greens attacked him. Since they had no intellectual or political ground upon which to stand, they resorted to ad hominem gossip and personal caricature. They said his tone was unpleasant and unduly harsh. They accused him of waging a “turf war” and seeking to foment a “red-green putsch.” Bookchin gave as good as he got, but the fight became bitter. By the time he died in 2006, the embers had long since cooled, but his reputation was still tainted as that of an ornery, peevish, resentful old man.
***
Andy Price, a native of Manchester, U.K., never met Bookchin, but in the early 2000s, having enrolled at his local university, he began to pore over Bookchin’s writings, paying special attention to this debate. As he waded through the jabs and counter-jabs, parsing the ad hominem slurs, carefully examining the debate with a fresh outsider’s eye, he kept thinking (as he recounts) that in the next paragraph he would finally come to a the intellectual substance of the greens’ objection to Bookchin’s argument—they would finally make a serious rejoinder. But he never found it.
He has now written Recovering Bookchin, his first book, to clear away the smoke and debris raised by the fracas and shine a light on the thing that went missing from the angry greens’ side: content. In terms of content, he concludes, the deep ecologists and their apologists, for all their fulminations, never laid a glove on Murray Bookchin.
Price’s book not only “recovers” Bookchin from the 1990s mud-slinging; it validates Bookchin's thesis that argumentation (as opposed to mindless, nodding consensus) clarifies ideas. Not only is it an essential text for all future study of social ecology; it will likely educate even many current social ecologists about just what social ecology is.
* * *
Some leftist literature dissects the ills of the existing society, revealing its many abuses and injustices: it is engaged with the “what is.” Another sort of literature is prospective, envisioning alternative social arrangements in works that range from utopian dreams to detailed blueprints: the “what should be.”
Bookchin’s work ranges over the terrain between the two, the realm that lies between the "what is" and the "what should be.” There in that intermediate zone, as Price makes clear, Bookchin looked for actual pathways that could take us from the existing society to a new, rational one that would be both ecological and humane. By examining these potentialities, dialectically, he tried to show the radical left how, beyond mounting rallies and protests demonstrations, it could embark on the formidable process of making a transition to the good society.
But as Price shows, even Bookchin’s more sophisticated critics, accustomed to more conventional ways of thinking, misunderstood this about him, misunderstood the dialectical nature of his cast of mind and of his writing and of his entire project. Does Bookchin tell us (in his book The Ecology of Freedom) that long ago, in “organic” or tribal societies, people lived harmoniously? Then, his critics say, he is guilty of misrepresentation, since he has neglected to inform us that intertribal warfare was endemic in those societies as well. Does Bookchin writes about cities (in many works, including Urbanization Without Cities)? Then, his critics say, he must be in favor of cities as they are today, anonymous, sterile, concrete moonscapes. Does Bookchin designate the citizen (rather than the worker) the agent of revolutionary change? That is intolerable, say his anarchist critics, for “citizen” is a statist concept. Does Bookchin find that a path toward change runs through existing city government? Then that clinches the case against him as a statist, for the city today is merely a miniature nation-state.
In each of these and other objections made by Bookchin’s critics in the more sober 1990s debates, Price shows that Bookchin was misunderstood. If he high highlighted the peaceable cooperative qualities of “organic society,” it was simply to show us that people had lived cooperatively once and can do so again—not to say that that society was perfect. If he argued that the city contains a possible path to change, it was simply to identify a possibility, to make cities places of conviviality and political vitality and ecological sanity, not to guarantee the final outcome of taking the path, let alone to endorse the existing city.
A pattern emerges, as Price’s recovery operation proceeds: he shows us that Bookchin the dialectician worked in the realm between is and ought, the terrain between the sordid today and the possible tomorrow. Price’s great achievement is to explicate the ways that Bookchin charted that terrain.
For me, the subtlest and most illuminating section of his book is the one that treats the subject of ethics. Bookchin proposed that one could ground an ethical system in nature. Among social ecologists, the subject of such an “objective ethics” has been a tortured one—even some of Bookchin’s most fervent admirers have rejected this part of his work. Granted, the phrase “objective ethics” hints at all kinds of philosophical dangers and social pitfalls. But Bookchin was well aware of them, and as Price shows, he never meant to say that nature is somehow ethical in itself.
Then Price proceeds to explain, far better than anyone ever has (myself included), what Bookchin meant. Nature unfolds in a process of growing complexity and diversity. Its directionality has led to increasingly self-conscious life forms. That's an unfolding history on which ethics can be grounded. Once again, the key to this question is potentiality: "Bookchin is not reading his ethics as a fact of nature, but solely as grounded on a potentiality, elicited by speculative thought, that can be found in natural processes." Our place in evolution is itself an objective potentiality for the creation of an ecological society.
The problems of ethics, and of humanity’s place in nature, are ones that the environmental movement is grappling with even today. In some quarters discontent is growing with the notion that nature is radically separate from humanity, with misanthropy, and with rejections of civilization. Today’s “green modernists” (as opposed to “green traditionalists”) are recognizing that untouched wilderness doesn’t really exist, and that people are actually part of nature, part of all ecosystems. Fans of Emma Marris’s 2011 book Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World are hungry for a framework that is not only pro-environment but pro-humanity and even pro-technology.
They would do well to consider Bookchin’s work, as decades ago he brought the wrath of the green movement down upon himself by asserting that human beings—with selfhood and reason—are part of the continuum nature, having evolved within it. That humanity is uniquely aware of this fact and is capable of guiding nature as a whole toward the fulfillment of its potentialities for freedom and self-consciousness. Twenty-five years ago “stewardship” was a dirty word. Perhaps even that attitude is changing, giving a “recovered” Bookchin a new relevance.
* * *
During the 1990s, Bookchin embroiled himself in a related conflict within the anarchist movement, criticizing this movement’s lack of a “social” component as well, and bringing down similar damage to his reputation, this time partly deserved. But then, by the mid-1990s the political reaction was grinding him down, causing the potentialities that he had so lovingly identified and watered and nurtured to wane. The terrain of potentiality, between is and ought, was looking less like a forest and more like a desert.
Meanwhile his writings were being translated into other languages, absent the smoke and debris, so outside the English-speaking world, Bookchin’s avid readers had no inkling of the ad hominem debates. The result is that today radical movements in those places have no need of a Bookchin recovery operation. For example, when I traveled to Greece, in the fall of 2008, admirers of the many Greek translations of his work asked me what was happening with Bookchin’s ideas back in the United States. I explained that his reputation was still clouded by the ad hominem nastiness of the previous years and had yet to emerge from it. They looked at me in bafflement, as if to ask (or so I imagined), why are Americans so hung up on personality? What about content?
Another example: Bookchin’s work has been much translated into Turkish, where the Kurds of southeastern Anatolia have embraced it wholeheartedly. The paralyzing ad hominem trashings are unknown to them: and as I write, they are attempting to implement social ecology, in cities and towns and villages of Hakkari and Van and Batman and Diyarbakir. More than anywhere else in the world, the Kurds are struggling to build a grassroots-democratic, ecological society, on the basis of Bookchin’s ideas.
Price’s enthusiasm for his excellent task is evident on every page. Defying the stylistic constraints of academic writing, he writes with verve and panache. In the process of recovering the work of an honest and brilliant and relevant thinker whose work was, twenty-some years ago, unjustifiably sullied, he has established himself as, hands down, the foremost living interpreter of the literary oeuvre of Murray Bookchin.
September 23, 2015
RECOVERING BOOKCHIN (2012) by Andy Price provides us with a nuanced, rigorously researched, and non-doctrinaire reconstruction of Bookchin's social ecology (with especial emphasis upon Bookchin's last 20 years of writing and debates with deep ecologists and anarchists). The singular fact that it is a undogmatic examination of the Bookchin legacy is enough reason alone to pick up a copy (if you can find it)! Sadly, like much else in contemporary life, the mass culture afterglow of Bookchin is rife with what Price appropriately refers to as a "caricature," which dismisses his body of work as the product of a cranky, self-aggrandising and uncharitable pugilist. Such self-serving attempts to deride the Bookchin legacy, often for personal gain, will thankfully not withstand the test of time, if books like this one are a sign of things to come.
Along with Damian White's 2009 book, BOOKCHIN: A CRITICAL APPRAISAL, this is the only other book currently available that could be described as an earnest attempt to grapple with the political theory and the debates which characterised Bookchin's work in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. Very little scholarship currently exists on Bookchin's work, especially the 'communalist' period of the early 2000s, and Price's book is scholarly in the best sense of the word. While Bookchin's work is not thoroughly examined within the wider constellation of theoretical relationships - for example his tenuous relationship with the Frankfurt School and especially the work of Habermas, his evolving characterisation of Marx and Marxism, and more interesting and heterodox questions like his evaluation of feminist theory, which remain, so far as I know, unanswered - Price does delve into the content of debates which have often been overlooked or remain unknown, particularly Bookchin's break with anarchism in the late 1990s.
The critical discussion of Bookchin's anthropological merits was a particular highlight, as well as the solid research that underlies the chapter on 'The Genesis of the Bookchin Caricature.' There is also an elaborate and very considered analysis of the merits and potential defects of Bookchin's mature praxis model of 'communalism' or 'libertarian municipalism.'
This book was unfortunately published with a small press, so I would suspect the book itself does not have especially wide distribution. For any who are interested in the Bookchin legacy, however, this book is highly meritorious and should be tracked down at all costs.
In 255 pages, a truly accomplished 'recovery' of Bookchin's legacy takes place.
Along with Damian White's 2009 book, BOOKCHIN: A CRITICAL APPRAISAL, this is the only other book currently available that could be described as an earnest attempt to grapple with the political theory and the debates which characterised Bookchin's work in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. Very little scholarship currently exists on Bookchin's work, especially the 'communalist' period of the early 2000s, and Price's book is scholarly in the best sense of the word. While Bookchin's work is not thoroughly examined within the wider constellation of theoretical relationships - for example his tenuous relationship with the Frankfurt School and especially the work of Habermas, his evolving characterisation of Marx and Marxism, and more interesting and heterodox questions like his evaluation of feminist theory, which remain, so far as I know, unanswered - Price does delve into the content of debates which have often been overlooked or remain unknown, particularly Bookchin's break with anarchism in the late 1990s.
The critical discussion of Bookchin's anthropological merits was a particular highlight, as well as the solid research that underlies the chapter on 'The Genesis of the Bookchin Caricature.' There is also an elaborate and very considered analysis of the merits and potential defects of Bookchin's mature praxis model of 'communalism' or 'libertarian municipalism.'
This book was unfortunately published with a small press, so I would suspect the book itself does not have especially wide distribution. For any who are interested in the Bookchin legacy, however, this book is highly meritorious and should be tracked down at all costs.
In 255 pages, a truly accomplished 'recovery' of Bookchin's legacy takes place.
May 10, 2023
This book is the best analysis of Bookchin’s work ever written. Well reasoned and expertly written, Price unpacks the revolutionary potential of Bookchin’s ideas and how we can take that mission into our own communities.
March 6, 2013
In this book, Andy Price gives a good introduction to the essence of what Bookchin meant by social ecology, and to his programme for political change along anarchist and ecological lines.
The book is not a simple primer, though. Quite a large chunk of the book is given over to a vicious academic battle of which I was completely unaware. Bookchin, it seems, has been maligned quite badly by his former colleagues in the anarchist and Deep Ecology worlds, and this is Price’s attempt to “recover” the essence of Bookchin’s thought, much of which got lost in the attacks on him towards the end of his life (he died in 2006).
What I liked about the book was its clarity of purpose. Price is not trying to wade into the ideological battle that engulfed Bookchin’s last twenty years. His aim is to detach Bookchin’s thought from the more personal slurs on Bookchin himself, and to examine it and see if it holds any useful points for us as we try to negotiate our way through a perilous-looking 21st century.
He does the job very thoroughly and effectively, and those new to Bookchin’s thought will get a good sense of what he stood for. The lengthy sections on the battles he fought with other thinkers are surprisingly enlightening, too. Bookchin’s break with the Deep Ecology movement came as a result of an incident in 1987 which says a lot about him. Deep Ecology claims that living beings are all of equal value and should be treated as such – humans are just a part of the ecology of the world, with no claim to superiority. Sounds good to me. But the problem Bookchin saw in the work of many deep ecologists of the 1980s was a callousness towards people, and an inability to see the social causes of ecological crises. For example, one deep ecologist claimed that the solution to the Ethiopian famine was to “just let nature there seek its own balance, to let the people there just starve”.
Bookchin, on the other hand, emphasised the social causes, and believed in social solutions. He said the Ethiopians were starving “not because of nature. It is because of civil war, agribusiness, social problems.” The deep ecologists’ emphasis on population as a problem ignored the fact that it’s rich societies that consume most of the resources and reap most of the ecological havoc; it blamed poor Ethiopian farmers for the problems created by CEOs and politicians. The very idea of an ecological balance, he said, made no sense in a world already heavily affected by human development. The solution is not to turn back the clock to find a mythical balance, but to participate in creating solutions using the consciously-formed communities that are humanity’s unique achievement. By seeking to redress the anthropocentric view of the world, the deep ecologists went too far and made humans into a kind of scourge that existed outside nature. Bookchin’s idea was to create a truly ecological society that respected nature and saw humans as part of nature, not separate from it.
The book also uses Bookchin’s clashes with colleagues to illustrate more of his ideology. He broke with other anarchists, for example, in arguing for achieving social change through running for local elections. He saw the municipality as the vehicle for social change, and argued that social ecologists should take control of local councils and gradually federate with other like-minded local councils to effect change from the bottom up. To me it doesn’t sound very plausible, but then neither do the alternatives. Changing a system you fundamentally disagree with is a hard thing to do. Price does a good job of laying out exactly what Bookchin meant, and answering some of the main criticisms from anarchists who prefer to work outside the system.
The format works well, I think, because it naturally introduces not only Bookchin’s thought, but possible objections to it, and then answers those objections. Often the objections were things that I had come up with myself as well, so it was good to read Price’s rebuttals, which often made me think of the issue in a new way.
For those who are more familiar with the worlds of social ecology and anarchism, I’d say this is a must read. For more general readers like me, the detailed analysis of twenty-year-old academic infighting can be off-putting at first, but is surprisingly rewarding in giving a sense of Murray Bookchin’s thought and analysing it in the light of possible counter-arguments.
The book is not a simple primer, though. Quite a large chunk of the book is given over to a vicious academic battle of which I was completely unaware. Bookchin, it seems, has been maligned quite badly by his former colleagues in the anarchist and Deep Ecology worlds, and this is Price’s attempt to “recover” the essence of Bookchin’s thought, much of which got lost in the attacks on him towards the end of his life (he died in 2006).
What I liked about the book was its clarity of purpose. Price is not trying to wade into the ideological battle that engulfed Bookchin’s last twenty years. His aim is to detach Bookchin’s thought from the more personal slurs on Bookchin himself, and to examine it and see if it holds any useful points for us as we try to negotiate our way through a perilous-looking 21st century.
He does the job very thoroughly and effectively, and those new to Bookchin’s thought will get a good sense of what he stood for. The lengthy sections on the battles he fought with other thinkers are surprisingly enlightening, too. Bookchin’s break with the Deep Ecology movement came as a result of an incident in 1987 which says a lot about him. Deep Ecology claims that living beings are all of equal value and should be treated as such – humans are just a part of the ecology of the world, with no claim to superiority. Sounds good to me. But the problem Bookchin saw in the work of many deep ecologists of the 1980s was a callousness towards people, and an inability to see the social causes of ecological crises. For example, one deep ecologist claimed that the solution to the Ethiopian famine was to “just let nature there seek its own balance, to let the people there just starve”.
Bookchin, on the other hand, emphasised the social causes, and believed in social solutions. He said the Ethiopians were starving “not because of nature. It is because of civil war, agribusiness, social problems.” The deep ecologists’ emphasis on population as a problem ignored the fact that it’s rich societies that consume most of the resources and reap most of the ecological havoc; it blamed poor Ethiopian farmers for the problems created by CEOs and politicians. The very idea of an ecological balance, he said, made no sense in a world already heavily affected by human development. The solution is not to turn back the clock to find a mythical balance, but to participate in creating solutions using the consciously-formed communities that are humanity’s unique achievement. By seeking to redress the anthropocentric view of the world, the deep ecologists went too far and made humans into a kind of scourge that existed outside nature. Bookchin’s idea was to create a truly ecological society that respected nature and saw humans as part of nature, not separate from it.
The book also uses Bookchin’s clashes with colleagues to illustrate more of his ideology. He broke with other anarchists, for example, in arguing for achieving social change through running for local elections. He saw the municipality as the vehicle for social change, and argued that social ecologists should take control of local councils and gradually federate with other like-minded local councils to effect change from the bottom up. To me it doesn’t sound very plausible, but then neither do the alternatives. Changing a system you fundamentally disagree with is a hard thing to do. Price does a good job of laying out exactly what Bookchin meant, and answering some of the main criticisms from anarchists who prefer to work outside the system.
The format works well, I think, because it naturally introduces not only Bookchin’s thought, but possible objections to it, and then answers those objections. Often the objections were things that I had come up with myself as well, so it was good to read Price’s rebuttals, which often made me think of the issue in a new way.
For those who are more familiar with the worlds of social ecology and anarchism, I’d say this is a must read. For more general readers like me, the detailed analysis of twenty-year-old academic infighting can be off-putting at first, but is surprisingly rewarding in giving a sense of Murray Bookchin’s thought and analysing it in the light of possible counter-arguments.
October 28, 2023
Overall I found this book enjoyable, though sometimes dry and boring. Price does a good job of bringing up arguments people made about Bookchin and his theories, and dispelling them. He complains that people (specifically deep ecologists (especially Earth First!) and anarchists) painted Bookchin as a grumpy old man who liked to start fights. I don't know why he had to do that though. Personally I like a grumpy old anarchist. How can one stay radical into old age and not be grumpy?
My problem with Bookchin has always been that his version of history seems partially made up and utopian, and his solutions seem unrealistic. Reading this book helped me look at Bookchin's work as part philosophy, part fantasy and it makes me want to go back and re-read it all.
My problem with Bookchin has always been that his version of history seems partially made up and utopian, and his solutions seem unrealistic. Reading this book helped me look at Bookchin's work as part philosophy, part fantasy and it makes me want to go back and re-read it all.
April 13, 2024
This is my first time grappling formally with Bookchin or critiques of Bookchin and it’s given me a lot to think about. Really intriguing stuff. A different way to look at both the political aspects of both Marxism and Anarchism.
July 12, 2020
Fantastic synthesis of Murray Bookchins political philosophy, and also a great examination of the many controversies which plauged is later years.
June 19, 2023
Recovering Bookchin 2e by Andy Price not only returns any discussion around Murray Bookchin to his ideas, but also serves as an excellent introduction to his thought.
Admittedly the only work I have read of Bookchin's is The Ecology of Freedom, and that was quite some time ago, so this volume served as a wonderful refresher on what I (used to) know and an introduction to what I didn't. With the many ecological and environmental crises we are facing, this offers excellent ideas to shape the future and, hopefully, avoid contributing too much more to our destruction.
While this is wonderful as a book of ideas, I think many readers will also enjoy reading about the infighting that resulted when Bookchin made quite well-founded critiques of both the Deep Ecology movement and what he called "lifestyle anarchism." Rather than defend themselves against the critiques and/or attach weaknesses in Bookchin's own philosophy, they attacked him in an effort to discredit him. These attacks were amazingly vitriolic and largely without substance.
Price presents, then dissects, those ad hominem attacks. He then shows that the critiques were consistent with the body of Bookchin's previous work. Finally, he addresses the more robust actual criticism of the philosophy, which demonstrates that, while not perfect, it was solid, well-argued, and most of all valuable. Price follows this pattern for both strands of attacks on Bookchin.
What makes this an essential read now is the way Price shows how we need to bring Bookchin's ideas into our current debates about what to do and how to do it. There is a lot of value here and we would be best served if we build upon, and modify where necessary, the work that has already been done.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via Edelweiss.
Admittedly the only work I have read of Bookchin's is The Ecology of Freedom, and that was quite some time ago, so this volume served as a wonderful refresher on what I (used to) know and an introduction to what I didn't. With the many ecological and environmental crises we are facing, this offers excellent ideas to shape the future and, hopefully, avoid contributing too much more to our destruction.
While this is wonderful as a book of ideas, I think many readers will also enjoy reading about the infighting that resulted when Bookchin made quite well-founded critiques of both the Deep Ecology movement and what he called "lifestyle anarchism." Rather than defend themselves against the critiques and/or attach weaknesses in Bookchin's own philosophy, they attacked him in an effort to discredit him. These attacks were amazingly vitriolic and largely without substance.
Price presents, then dissects, those ad hominem attacks. He then shows that the critiques were consistent with the body of Bookchin's previous work. Finally, he addresses the more robust actual criticism of the philosophy, which demonstrates that, while not perfect, it was solid, well-argued, and most of all valuable. Price follows this pattern for both strands of attacks on Bookchin.
What makes this an essential read now is the way Price shows how we need to bring Bookchin's ideas into our current debates about what to do and how to do it. There is a lot of value here and we would be best served if we build upon, and modify where necessary, the work that has already been done.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via Edelweiss.
June 6, 2023
Difficult in places but an ultimately rewarding read.
December 29, 2024
Great overview and defense of Bookchin's work. Nothing is perfect and if we don't get organized soon it will just be more and difficult to avoid the juggernaut of disaster approaching
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